A long-standing problem for wearers of hearing aid technology is the difficulty of segregating sounds heard simultaneously from different sources. Segregation is a person's ability to focus on one sound when others—often many others—are present and may even be intrusive on one another. While people without hearing impairment have refined this ability over their lifetimes, to the point where it is second nature, those who rely on a hearing aid, particularly those who are fitted with a pair of hearing aids, are presented with a combination of sounds from which it proves difficult to separate out a source of interest from the background. It has been discovered by the hearing aid industry that many of the things that people of normal hearing do to achieve segregation, e.g., using spatial recognition, don't work as well or at all for people who rely on hearing devices. Recipients of cochlear implant technology in particular have difficulty with segregation.
The problem of poor segregation ability becomes acutely challenging in a situation when a hearing aid recipient is listening to a remote audio source such as a TV, or a classroom instructor, but where there are also significant ambient sounds from closer proximity, e.g., persons sitting next to the recipient and talking among themselves, that distract and interfere from the sound of focus. A similar situation arises when the recipient is equipped with an accessory, e.g., a wireless device such as a TV streamer or remote microphone, that is channeling audio signals from a remote source to their hearing device, but they also want to hear ambient sounds via their behind-the-ear (BTE) microphone.
It happens that mostly for people with just one hearing device (on either ear), poor segregation ability is not a primary issue with their hearing aid technology. Furthermore, due to budgetary issues, most recipients of implant technology only have a single implant. But, very few people just have deafness in one ear, which means that a pair of implants would be considerably beneficial in most cases, assuming that the concomitant problem of poor segregation can be addressed.
The problem is best illustrated by the example of a student who is a cochlear implant (CI) recipient in a classroom with a teacher who is equipped with a wireless remote microphone that communicates what she is saying to the student. But the student needs to be able to hear both the teacher and her fellow students during a classroom discussion. Mixing the signals from the teacher's microphone with the ambient signals from the rest of the classroom allows the student to hear both, but also means that classroom noise picked up by the BTE microphone is a distraction when the teacher is speaking. Thus, simply mixing the two signals together still makes it difficult to hear each one distinctly.
Accordingly, there is a need for a method and device that can process the audio inputs that the recipient's hearing devices receive, and achieve an effective segregation of remote from local sources in a manner that facilitates the recipient's perception of both sources.
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